Wednesday, March 16, 2005
Treated to refusal
Feeding Chloë is a slow process. It consists of a series of attempts to persuade her to take a spoonful of food. Some of these attempts are successful, but often they are rebuffed. We typically have four or five different foodstuffs available at any given meal, and she will cheerfully eat several bites of (say) scrambled egg, then refuse to touch it again until she has had her fill of something else. I suppose none of us wants to eat all the meat, then all the carrots, then all the potatoes and so on.
At the end of the meal we take a final tour through the food choices of the day. Only when she has rejected a final bite of each of them do we determine that her meal is at an end. It reminds me of a phrase used to describe lumber that has been treated with preservative for outdoor use. The preservative is applied to the wood under pressure until it will take no more. The product is then labelled as "treated to refusal" which I think describes our post-prandial daughter very well.
